Published on to joshleeb's blog
G’day!
For personal projects this month, the focus has been on Pinto and starting fresh with a new codebase.
Pinto is a bookmarking service and RSS feed reader inspired by Pinboard and Miniflux, but with a few neat features planned such as bookmark linking. It really deserves it’s own post discussing the ideas and motivations, but at a high level it came from the thought that
- While Pinboard is a fantastic social bookmarking tool
- Interacting with RSS feeds alongside bookmarks would certainly be useful
- And surely there is a better way to organize bookmarks than tagging
- While Miniflux is a fantastic RSS Feed Reader
The thought experiment of starting out with a social bookmarking service and adding features from RSS Feed Readers has led to some interesting ideas for curating the content you are interested in on the web, and sharing that curation with others.
To be clear, the kind of content I’m talking about here comes from the Small Web. It’s articles and posts uploaded to sites managed by regular people. The web of the 90’s and 00’s and not the web of sites optimized for engagement and conversions. For more, see Rediscovering the Small Web and The Small Web is Beautiful.
For now though, Pinto is a project just for me and something I want to use for managing my reading list of blogposts and articles.
On the technical side, there’s been a lot of setup this month. So far I’ve implemented user accounts and sessions (i.e: signup and login), and the basics for creating, editing, and deleting bookmarks. And I’ll finish off this month by listing bookmarks on the homepage for the logged in user.
Next, the plan is to take a look at search and organization. I wrote a post on this topic a few months ago and since then my thoughts have progressed after trying out a few prototypes with my actual bookmarks. But more on that next time.
That’s all for now, see you next month!